On the morning of Day 69, the expedition climbed down from the high granite shelf and plunged deep into the inside basin of Hushwood.
Within three hundred paces of leaving the rocks, the sky vanished almost fully. Eighty feet overhead, the wide, flat, linked boughs of the mature resin pines wove together into a nonstop, twilight roof that admitted only occasional, shifting shafts of pale greenish-gold light. The open horizons that Kezra Venn had relied on since childhood—the familiar chimney silhouettes of Kilnstep, the jagged fiery teeth of Blackglass, the pale limestone scarps of the western plateau—were snuffed out as fully as if an iron shutter had closed across the world.
To a land-mapper trained on open hillsides, the total loss of distant landmarks was deeply disorienting.
In open country, a traveler checked her course by sighting back to a prominent crag or church tower every mile. Under a closed subalpine canopy, where every pine trunk looked like its neighbor and the forest floor rolled in endless, moss-covered swells, the human ear and inner balance played insidious tricks. A subtle five-degree tilt in a hillside path, unnoticed by tired knees, could bend an expedition’s line into a wide, nested circle within two hours, returning exhausted travelers to their own cold campfire. Meanwhile, they believed they were marching straight north.
